“Let’s just say your daughter has one heck of a right hook,” Marc said, laughter bubbling up behind his words.

“I’m not surprised.” Our esteemed Alpha gave Marc directions to the exposed corpse as we settled into the car, and by the time we turned left out of the empty lot, he’d hung up the phone.

“So, what are we supposed to do with the body?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew the answer.

“Bury it. Unless you’d rather take it to school for show-and-tell?”

“Smart-ass,” I snapped. Burial was what I’d expected. Unfortunately, we hadn’t come prepared with a backhoe. Or a coffin. Al we had was an emergency kit and a couple of shovels Marc kept in the trunk, for just such an occasion.

Huffing in irritation, I glanced at my clothes, selected with our weekend getaway in mind. But our trip had been canceled. There would be no quiet dinner in a nice restaurant with cloth napkins. No popcorn in the dark theater. No private hotel room, far from the inescapable eyes and ears of our fel ow werecats.

Instead, we’d be working. All night. For no overtime.

Most of my friends had returned to school the week before and had probably spent their night gathered around textbooks and boxes of pizza.

I, on the other hand, had chased down a trespasser, in three-inch heels, and would soon be digging a grave by hand in the middle of the night.

I felt my mood darken just thinking of school, and of not being there.

Of not completing my master’s degree, or even using my brand new BA in the foreseeable future. But I’d bargained with my father for the next two years and three months of my life, to be spent serving the Pride and training for a future I wasn’t even sure I wanted.

“Definitely a broken neck.”

“Hmm?” I murmured, staring hard at the line of trees twenty feet to the east. If I focused on them, on the way the moon cast ever-shifting shadows of the branches as they swayed in the early-morning breeze, I wouldn’t have to look at the corpse. And I really didn’t want to look at the corpse.

We’d found him just where the informant had said we would, in an empty field about half an hour south of Little Rock, near a tiny rural town called White Hall, which boasted some six thousand residents. From what little I could see of it in the dark, White Hal seemed like a decent place to grow up. A place that did not deserve a middle-of-thenight visit from us.

Marc turned his flashlight to my face, and I winced, squeezing my eyes shut against the sudden glare. “Pay attention, Faythe,” he snapped, his earlier playfulness gone. He was all business now, kneeling next to the dead man who lay facedown in the grass. “I said it’s definitely a broken neck. Come feel this.”

“No thanks.” I shoved his flashlight aside and blinked impatiently, waiting for the floating circles of light to fade from my vision. “I can see it fine from here.”

“Yes, but you can’t feel it.”

I glanced down to see Marc’s fist around a handful of the corpse’s hair, using it to rotate the poor man’s head, which obviously provided no resistance. “The bones kind of…crunch, when you turn his neck. That means his vertebrae are fractured.”

“Fascinating. Really.” I swallowed thickly, and Marc continued to twist the man’s neck, his ear aimed at the ground. Maybe he could actually hear the bones grinding together. Ewwwww. “Could you stop that, please? Leave the poor man alone.”

“Sorry.” He dropped the head, and it hit the grass with a nauseatingly solid thunk. “It’s weird, though. Not a bite or fresh claw mark anywhere.”

“How do you know? You’ve only seen his neck.” With a resigned sigh, I stared down at the body, scenes from the latest CSI rerun flashing through my mind. “Shouldn’t we turn him over, or check for wounds beneath his clothes, or something like that? What if he was killed somewhere else, then moved here to keep us from finding the real crime scene?”

“Crime scene?” Marc laughed, and I gritted my teeth, uneasy with the fact that he was so comfortable around corpses. “You watch too much TV,” he said, refocusing the light on the werecat’s neck.

Only it wasn’t just any werecat. It was a stray—a human initiated into our secret existence by violence rather than by birth. At least he had been a stray. Now he was dead, and his social standing no longer mattered.

Lucky bastard.

“It’s research.” I dragged my gaze from the corpse to Marc’s face. His gold-flecked brown eyes glittered in the moonlight.

“Whatever.” Marc shrugged, and the flashlight’s beam swung off into the grass. “My point is that he wasn’t bitten or clawed. I don’t smell blood.”

Pushing damp strands of hair from my face, I sniffed the air, flushing in annoyance when I realized he was right; if there had been any blood present, fresh or old, we would have smelled it. And if there was no blood, there had been no fight. No werecat—even one in human form—would fail to draw blood with a bite or scratch.

How was I sure the murderer was a werecat? Simple. No human had the strength to break a man’s neck one-handed, and judging from the bruises on the back of the dead guy’s neck, that was exactly what had happened to him. Sure, in theory it could have been a bruin, or one of the other shape-shifter species, but the chances of that were almost nil.

What few other breeds existed weren’t interested in us, and the feeling was mutual.

“Oh,” I said, glancing again at the trees as I conceded his point. What else could I say? Marc was the expert on dead bodies, and in spite of having…um…made one a few months earlier, I knew almost nothing about murder victims. And I liked it that way.